


the song remains the same (reverse-verse)

by adarksweetness (chayaasi)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, reverse-verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 17:36:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4634187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chayaasi/pseuds/adarksweetness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“And what is it you want from me?"  <br/>“You really don’t know the answer to that? I want to say Yes to you."</p>
<p>In which Michael finally meets the archangel Dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the song remains the same (reverse-verse)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Omano](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omano/gifts).



> Happy belated birthday!

Somewhere, a heavy door snapped off its hinges. Somewhere, Lucifer’s body hit the floor in a heap of lacerations and crushed bones. Michael groaned as Dorothy took advantage of his distraction to slam his head against the nearest wall, awakening old bruises and imparting some fresh ones. His vision swam briefly, but he braced himself to stand up anyway because if Lucifer was down for the count, Chuck—and their whole lineage thereby—was all but dead meat.   
  
It still didn’t seem possible that Chuck Shurley, who was currently whimpering pitifully behind a curtain, would end up becoming the stern father and infamous hunter who taught him and Lucifer everything they knew. But then again, being zapped into the past to save their future dad from being hunted down by rouge angels should have expanded their definition of possible. Speaking of which…

Michael twisted in Dorothy’s superhuman grasp. At the corner of his eye, Celeste—that treacherous snake— advanced on Chuck, blade drawn and eyes pitiless. Her lips moved as she whispered her regrets, but before the cruel point of her blade could find purchase, the room grew warm.   
  
“Charlie."  
  
The angel whipped around immediately, turning her back to Chuck as she frantically searched for the voice. Michael didn’t even need to see her face to feel the terror rolling off of her in waves. After all, his own skin prickled when the shadows moved, and a man stepped in through the ruined front door.

It wouldn’t be entirely right to call him the mechanic who had lured Chuck out here in the first place with an urgent call about his car because the angels were pulling too many strings these days. And besides, no human could scare the crap out of Celeste like this; make her lower her blade and shrink back into her vessel like an anxious rabbit.  
  
“Dean,” she gasped, and within the bounds of that single syllable, Michael broke into goosebumps. He slipped out of Dorothy’s grasp, just in time to watch Dean reach out and caress Celeste’s cheek. It was soft, almost a brotherly gesture until he drove her own blade into her heart in the blink of an eye. 

Everything after that was holy fire, blazing starkly against the gray darkness. The angel Celeste’s grace burned out with her screams, and Dean cradled her smoldering vessel in his arms until it too crumbled to ashes around the angel blade.  
  
Dorothy shuddered in the silence that followed.  
  
“Dean,” she pleaded when his malachite gaze turned on her like an approaching cataclysm. “If I had known—oh!" 

She was abruptly cut off by the angel blade, which flashed as it sailed across the room and struck the wooden post just a hair’s distance from her left eye.    
  
“ _Goodbye_ , Dorothy.” Dean said pointedly. A snap of his fingers and she was gone, which apparently proved too much for Chuck.  
  
“Oh my God! Oh! my! God!” he wheezed, eyes widening hysterically as he stared up at Dean’s impressive height. “Who are you? _What_  are you?"  
  
Dean’s brow merely wrinkled, bemused. “Yeah, I think you’re due for a nap, pal.” he muttered. He placed two fingers against Chuck’s forehead, and the man dropped like a stone.  
  
Michael winced; it was disturbing to see the man so still. Nevertheless, the archangel was occupied and Michael stumbled forward, breath ragged as he hunted around for Lucifer. His brother lay prone in a dusty corner, blond hair stained worryingly red, but before Michael could go to his side, the weight of Dean’s attention stopped him in his tracks. It was a heated gaze, literally, because Michael could feel his skin prickle like he was under a particularly relentless summer sun.  
  
“Fix him,” he demanded anyway, pointing at Lucifer.   
  
Dean spared a cursory glance in Lucifer’s general direction, but didn’t seem interested in doing anymore mojo. “He’s fine,” he shrugged. “Looks worse than it is.”  
  
Michael sighed sharply, irritated and resigned all at once, but he didn’t want to argue. Not with Dean anyway. Ignoring the ache in his ribs, he looked up to meet the angel’s bright eyes. “Fine. Then, we need to talk.”  
  
“Really?"  
  
“Yes,” Michael limped across the floor cautiously, circling the archangel to stand before him. “In fact, I’d say this conversation is long overdue."  
  
“That so?” Dean raised his chin, giving the impression of attentiveness even if Michael suspected he wasn’t exactly impressed. “And what is it you want from me?"  
  
Michael blinked, little nails of doubt chipping away at all the confidence he’d built for this moment. “You really don’t know the answer to that?” he asked skeptically. “I want to say Yes to you."  


* * *

 

_Six months ago..._  
  
Zachariah stood impatiently outside their motel room, wedging himself under the purely decorative piece of awning to keep himself out of the pouring rain. Michael put away his gun before he opened the door to let the man inside, and was promptly beaned in the chest with a heavy dufflebag. 

“Make sure there’s no water damage to that!” Zachariah commanded, shaking out his sodden hat and jacket right there on the floor because, well, rainwater was probably the least offensive thing to be splattered all over this 1-star establishment. “Thirty years fighting every claw, fang, and scum on God’s green earth…yet I can see the headlines now:  _Local Hero Sent to Early Grave by Flannel-Wearing Chuckleheads_."    
  
“Good to see you, too, Zach,” Michael replied, setting the bag on the nearby table just as Lucifer came out of the bathroom and grinned at the sight of their old mentor. 

“Yeah?” Michael heard his brother say. “And when did you become a hero?"  
  
“You guys…” Zachariah straightened to look over the two of them, and smiled as he reached out to gather them into a hug. “…make me so glad I didn’t have kids of my own.” he sighed blissfully.   
  
And yet, when Michael caught Lucifer’s eye over the man’s shoulder, he couldn’t help but grin. Despite the shit they’d been through over the last few months, despite the looming threat of a fucking Apocalypse, this— the three of them together—was good. It may be the last remaining dregs of a family huddled under a leaky roof, but three was a stable number. It made the outlook sunny, even for a few moments. 

And what precious few moments they were, because as soon as Zachariah opened up the lore, the magnitude of this shitstorm became apparent once again.   
  
“So, the Sword of Decanos.” the older man began, tapping at a passage at the very back of an old and shabby looking book. “We’re talking the angels’ own heavyweight, kiddos. When shit hit the fan upstairs, they say he’s the one who booted Samuel’s ass to the basement."  
  
“Who says?” asked Michael, raising an eyebrow.   
  
“Not your average Sunday school teacher, that’s for sure.” Zachariah shook his index finger sagely. “Those old guys’ll tell you that it was Adam, or Castiel, or some other saint _du jour_ who defeated ol’ Sam, but if you dig a little deeper, it all comes back to this guy."  
  
They all stared at the old etching together. It was pretty nondescript for an illustration of an archangel, especially one who was supposed to have defeated the Adversary. No wings, no silky frou-frou— just a regular looking guy, square-jawed but soft around the eyes, facing to one side with only a caption reading ‘DEKANVS’ to identify him.       


Michael stroked his finger along the thin gold arch of the archangel’s halo, even if it meant Zachariah would bitch him out later for getting grubby fingerprints all over his precious manuscripts, but there was something curious about the image. Decanos was clad in simple armor, his sword and shield leaning quite unthreateningly on either side of him. Michael himself didn’t profess to know much about art, but…what a strange way to draw a warrior. 

Still, it was compelling. Michael wondered if being the leader of the heavenly host was really as lonely as it looked. Or was he just projecting? 

He blinked when Lucifer nudged his arm and stared at him in askance. Michael cleared his throat. “So, do we have a picture of the actual sword?"  
  
Zachariah rolled his eyes. “You boys are lucky you’re pretty.” he deadpanned. “No, we don’t have a picture of the sword. Because in the unlikely event that the phrase isn’t a metaphor, which in my experience it almost always is, the lore says that after the big heavenly blowout, Deano here went awol."  
  
“Which still confirms Joshua’s message,” Lucifer pointed out, leaning back in his chair. “There is a weapon that can kick devil ass, but the angels don’t have said weapon.”  
  
“Then we find it,” Michael said. “If we figure out where it is, we can put this whole thing to bed.”  
  
“Oh my sweet, summer child,” Zachariah cooed in response, smiling in that sarcastically exuberant way of his. “It’s never that simple. Even if we found a sword that the whole host of angels and demons couldn’t, do you think it’s just going to be a matter of marching up to Samuel and hacking his head off?”

Michael watched the man stand and head to the dirty windows to peer at the storm outside. “No, kids, there will be a war. People will die. Best we can hope for is to win in time to save a few million. Maybe. But it’s better than the whole planet being roasted, right?”

Somehow, it didn’t make Michael feel better. Not even when Lucifer reached for him under the table and squeezed his hand. 

* * *

_Now…_

  
Dean was not ordinary, even for an angel. That was obvious to Michael, whose experience with angels wasn’t much outside brief hostilities. Well, there was Adam, who laid siege to Hell and raised him from perdition; there was Joanna, who short-circuited the entire eastern seaboard upon being summoned; there was Celeste and Dorothy, even if they were dicks. But none of them were Dean.    


Dean was an afterimage of a wildfire behind Michael’s eyes every time he blinked. 

Dean also looked at him in the same way the scope of a rifle looked at its target. “You want me to wear you?” he asked slowly. “Why?”

“Because it’s the only way, isn’t it?” Michael replied. “You need me to stand against Samuel. But I have a few conditions.”

Dean gestured magnanimously without speaking.

“You have to end him where he stands,” Michael continued. He was definitely less confident than he had been, but he’d some too far to stop now.  “No war, no armies—you spare this planet.”

“And in return, you’ll step up and play your role, is that it?” 

Michael nodded. Or he wanted to, but the whole situation was rubbing him the wrong way. Dean stood opposite him on the other end of a tense pause. A meeting of two made for each other should feel better than this, but it was more like watching a bonfire from afar without feeling its warmth.

He was ready to be consumed by the flame; Michael didn’t know what more he could offer. 

“See, you’re wrong.” the archangel said as a matter of fact. “You’re convinced I want to fight Samuel, but I don’t want that any more than you want Lucifer to die. No, the only thing I want is for my brother to come home."  
  
Michael’s lungs emptied, and his throat seemed too tight to fill them again. “What?”   
  
“You see,” Dean elaborated, eyes alight with grace. “My little brother and I, we didn’t always get along. I believed in Dad’s plan and did my best to obey Him, but Sammy was full of questions. I still loved him; he was a pain in the ass, but he was my little brother."  
  
Dean turned away, sweeping his gaze over Lucifer. “He may have defied our Father, and he betrayed me, but he was right in the end. I sacrificed everything for Dad, and he just took off without a word.“

“So you’re going to take it out on us?” Michael countered, dread evaporating in place of anger. “Do you think that will make your Dad proud?”

“Dad’s gone!” Dean snapped back. The air hummed and sparked when he turned back to level a stare at the mortal. “It’s just us now—me and Sammy against the world, as it were.”

* * *

_2 months ago…_

  
As Zachariah predicted, the whole search was going dismally. Even with his research and Joshua’s less flaky contributions, the only remotely credible lead turned out to be a salvage yard in Sioux Falls, and the only good news was that there was no news. For all the fuss being raised around his resurrection, Samuel himself seemed to be keeping on the down low.  
  
The same couldn’t be said for the demons though. Michael frowned suspiciously at the burnt out meatsuits strewn along a long pathway flanked by car parts and various other junk. Their cause of death stood at the end of the pathway, possessing some shabbily dressed redneck, and while Michael took it upon himself to approach with caution, Lucifer, who had fewer reservations, scoffed.  
  
“Oh great, the god squad is here.”  
  
The redneck angel sneered. “Son, I am having what you would call a trying day,” he replied, full of contempt. “So I suggest you shut your trap.”

“Who are you?” Michael asked before Lucifer could retort. “And what are you doing here?”

“You might find my true name a mouthful, so call me Bobby,” said the angel. “And I live here. Or I was, until I started getting pests.” He jabbed his chin at the hollow corpses and squinted back up at them. “Who do you think you idjits are, telling demons about Dean’s old sword?”  
  
“We didn’t tell anyone anything.” Michael replied just as Lucifer interjected with, “So, it’s here? Where?”

It was a little too loud, a little too eager. Bobby frowned. “Boy, is your head screwed on ok?” 

“Cut the games.” Lucifer snapped. Michael could only guess he was irritated, and honestly, he could relate “Just tell us where this sword is.”

“Or what?” Bobby countered, contempt replaced by something far more frightening. “You’re gonna mouth off some more? How’re you gonna that when you got throat cancer?”

He made a motion with one hand and Lucifer choked. A wet cough bubbled up his throat, scratching at his insides until he vomited a solid pint of blood on to the dirt ground. He dropped to his knees, pawing at his neck for relief that would never come.  

“Son of a bitch, let him go!” Michael shouted. “We’re on the same side!”

“Are we?” Bobby hummed nonchalantly as Lucifer curled up into a painful ball and whimpered as more blood seeped out the corner of his mouth.

“Yes,” Michael insisted desperately. “If we can find the sword, we can beat Samuel. Again.” 

Luckily, something seemed to click in Bobby just then. He lowered his hand and Lucifer stopped bleeding. Dropping to his own knees, Michael wrapped a steadying hand around his brother while Lucifer shook in the aftermath of his pain. 

“No, you ain’t.” Bobby said, quietly. “Not you. Samuel’s gonna tear your mug to pieces if he so much as senses you coming, but your brother here already knows that, don’t he?”

Michael grew cold even as he tightened his hold on Lucifer, who coughed and shook his head. 

“Michael, I swear, I don’t what he’s—“

“The dreams, numbnut,” Bobby insisted. “We know he’s been circlin’ you. We know he talks to you, and soon, he’s gonna pop the question.”

Lucifer took a deep breath, but didn’t reply, which it said everything Michael needed to know. A sense of vexation and dread returned, or perhaps it had never really gone away from the time Lucifer ran off with Nick on some half-baked plan to stop the last seal from breaking. 

“He’s gonna ask you to say Yes, so he can ride around in your skin.” Bobby continued, and then leveled a hard stare at Michael. “And your best bet is to do the same for Dean.”

“Say yes to what?” Michael asked through gritted teeth. He busied himself hauling Lucifer to his feet none too gently, dutifully ignoring that fact that he knew the answer somewhere at the back of his mind. 

“Because in case you idjits haven’t figured it out by now, there ain’t no sword,” said Bobby. “The only one who has a chance against Samuel is Dean, and you just happen to be his true vessel.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re chosen,” Bobby supplied. “Congrats.”

“No.” Lucifer caught his balance and wiped his mouth. “No, there has be another way.”

“There’s no other way. This prizefight’s been on the books since the lights were turned on ‘round here.” Bobby scratched under his grubby hat in a strangely hopeless, human gesture. “Sorry, but it’s been written.”

“That is such bullshit!” Lucifer declared. He tugged at his big brother’s arm for agreement, but Michael refused to meet his eyes. 

“Where is archangel Decanos?”

“Michael!”

Michael ignored his brother and frowned at Bobby. “If I’m to say yes, then he’s got to ask me, right?”

“True, but damned if I know.” Bobby replied, expression unreadable. “Ain’t nobody seen him since Sam got locked up.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Michael finally retorted, because at some point, the games were too much. “Do you have any idea how many people are going to die if Samuel goes unchecked? Your strongest enemy slipped his Cage and you’re telling me that your general is missing?”

“Ok, two things,” Bobby retorted, pinning them both with a glare. “Sam didn’t slip his Cage; you let him out. But the good news is that if he’s topside, then you can bet Dean ain’t far.”

Michael exhaled sharply. “And what else?”

Bobby smirked grimly, light already gathering in the palm of his vessel’s hand. “Get the hell off my property.”

//

“It’s my fault.” Lucifer said, sitting down heavily on the scratchy duvet. 

Bobby had zapped them back to their motel room, luckily, and not into some volcano in Iceland, but Michael figured there would be no point in going back to the salvage yard. They’d most likely just discover the place had never existed and there was nobody named Bobby in those parts. Fucking angels.   

Michael laid back on his own pillow and closed his eyes to the sound of Lucifer overflowing with anguish. 

“I killed Jessica, I set Samuel free. And…and now, I know what he wants from me.”

“You didn’t tell me about that.” Michael stated during the pause. “About the dreams.” There was no way he couldn’t sound accusing, but he didn’t think he cared at this point.   
  
Lucifer looked up at him sharply. “No, Michael, don’t look at me like that. You know if I could take it all back—“  
  
“But you can’t, can you?” Michael countered, glaring furiously at the ceiling. “Because it’s already happened; you chose demons over your own brother. You chose not to tell me that you were talking to the fucking devil!”

“Because look where it’s getting me! You would never have understood.”

“So what now? Should I just pretend that didn’t happen?” Michael let his head fall to side to look over at his brother. “That I can trust you?”

“Don’t,” Lucifer’s voice shook. “We’re going to fix this, and I need you to stand with me.” 

The noonday sun filtered in through their blinds, closed for added security, and in the dim light, Lucifer slipped from his own bed to join Michael on his. It was more than a little awkward, given his greater height and Michael’s refusal to accommodate, but he managed. 

“We’ll fix this,” he mumbled, his head heavy on Michael’s shoulder. “I won’t let Dean have you.”

* * *

_Now…_

 

“You’re wrong,” Michael said, voice barely audible through the tightness in this throat. “You can’t…you—“ 

He took a deep breath. “How can you be so arrogant? You think you know better than your Father? People…families, we’re as much part of Creation as you are— you and Samuel can’t just decide to throw that away!”  
  
“Actually, we can.” Dean replied, more gently than he had any right to. “That’s the whole point. Free will ain’t free, but it’s got perks.”

“Oh, chin up,” he smiled indulgently at the look on Michael’s face. “Unlike what my brothers have been telling you, it’s not gonna suck. You’re still my true vessel; you’ll be safe, and so will Lucifer when Sammy’s done wearing him. You might even be at peace, once it’s all over.”

Michael fumed, heat welling at the corner of his eyes because this was so much bigger than a battle. He could give up his body and soul to win a fight, but what could he, or anyone, do in the face of such awful, all-consuming love?

They were close now, close enough for Dean to touch him and Michael couldn’t help but shudder when warm fingertips trailed over the line of his cheekbone for a brief moment. The archangel kissed his forehead.

“See?” Dean murmured against his skin. “Don’t that feel like coming home?” 

Michael pulled away, and swiped a hand at the wet rim of his eyes. He would have spit out the rejection stuck there at the tip of his tongue, if Dean wouldn’t know it for a lie. Truth was: it did. Truth was: it was easy to love Dean, especially when he might love you back. 

“It’ll be over before you know it,” Dean informed him, crossing the floor to kneel by Lucifer. He touched him on his forehead, like he’d done with Chuck, and Lucifer was gone. “There. He’s home, safe and sound.”

Michael stared at the same hand outstretched before him. Beyond it was a clear night, with stars so bright that he could easily imagine plucking one out and skipping it across the sky. 

“Your turn,” said Dean. “If you still wanna go.”

 


End file.
